Deadlight (35 page)

Patti? For a moment, Faraday hadn’t got a clue who J-J was talking about. Then he remembered the Ansel Adams exhibition and the battered Jiffy bag full of snaps J-J had toted back from the Hayward Gallery. Twenty-plus years ago, Patti had been Janna’s best friend, a cheerful West Coast girl with a passion for downhill skiing and huge boxes of Belgian chocolates. What might two decades have done to that wide, wide smile?

Faraday had been trying to buy himself time for tomorrow’s trip to the West Country. Wallace had given him a number for Dave Beattie. On the phone, the man had seemed happy to see him. Ezentide Cottage was a nightmare to find and Beattie’s careful directions filled nearly a sheet of A4. The one-time Master-at-Arms was going out, but thought it was odds-on he’d be back by mid-morning, and in case he wasn’t there was a spare front door key under a slate behind the summerhouse. Coffee in the cupboard over the stove. Yesterday’s milk in the fridge. Only at the conversation’s end did Faraday enquire how long he’d been out of the navy, a question that had drawn a soft laugh.

‘’Eighty-three,’ he’d murmured. ‘Couldn’t wait.’

Now, hurrying through the paperwork that couldn’t
wait until Tuesday, Faraday wondered what might have driven this seagoing policeman back into civvy street so soon after the Falklands. Coughlin, too, had lasted barely a year after
Accolade
went down.

En route home, Faraday stopped at the big twenty-four-hour Tesco at the top of the city. The fish counter looked tempting, but a long-buried memory told him that Patti had once been a veggie and the last thing he wanted to do was hazard what promised to be an interesting evening. With eggs, beansprouts, spring onions, limes, cucumber and a thick peanut sauce, he could put together a huge plate of gado-gado, an Indonesian salad that he and Janna had practically lived on during those first months in Seattle. Memories of the big open-air market down on Pike Place brought a smile to his face, and he ducked out of the check-out queue to add a two-pound box of Belgian truffles to the pile of goodies in his trolley.

Back home, Patti had already arrived. J-J, suspiciously organised, had settled her in the garden with a bowl of pistachios and a bottle of good Chablis he’d pre-cooled in the ice box. Standing unnoticed in the big lounge, Faraday watched the pair of them talking.

J-J rarely made any allowances for other people’s unfamiliarity with sign, believing – often rightly – that there was a force and logic to gesture that demolished hang-ups about getting through to the deaf. In J-J’s world, communication was party-time and in his view there was literally nothing – no nuance, no implication – that couldn’t be transmitted through a bizarre and wholly personal repertoire that was closer to mime than classically taught sign. This was especially evident with people he liked, and watching them out in the sunshine, Faraday knew his boy had taken a very big shine to Patti. The pair of them were like boxers, leaning into a conversation that was wholly physical, all restraint abandoned in the race to make themselves understood. Party-time indeed.

Loath to disrupt this passionate exchange, Faraday
retreated to the fridge for a beer before joining them. Hearing the rumble of the big glass sliding doors, Patti froze, one arm raised, three fingers pointed skywards, turning in her chair to greet the figure emerging on to the lawn.

‘Joe.’ She got to her feet and ran across to give him a hug. Faraday held her for a moment, unaccountably overwhelmed, aware of J-J beaming at them both. Then he took a tiny step backwards, raising his glass in salute. Patti had taken to dyeing her hair blonde but otherwise this sturdy little woman was just the way he remembered her. Her face was still full of laughter and the passage of time had done nothing to dull the sparkle in her eye.

‘Boy looking after you OK?’ He gestured across at J-J. ‘Only he normally hates strangers.’

The gado-gado was a big success. A huge high pressure system had settled over the southern half of the country, and the three of them ate around a table in the garden, aware of the warm darkness stealing towards them across the harbour.

Patti was entranced by the house and its setting. She was still in touch with Janna’s parents, on the West Coast, and she’d seen some of the photos they’d brought back from their occasional visits. But no photo, she said, could possibly have done justice to an evening like this, and with J-J charged with clearing the table, she took Faraday by the arm and led him to the low hedge that fronted the towpath beside the harbour.

The moon was full tonight, a huge white orb the colour of clotted cream, and the rising spring tide lapped at the pebbles on the foreshore. When Faraday tried to take the conversation back to Seattle – remembered friends, familiar hang-outs – she put her finger to her lips, straining to distinguish the separate calls of birds out in the soft darkness.

‘What’s that? That flutey noise?’

‘Curlew.’

‘And that?’

‘Lapwing. Some winter days, if you’re really lucky, you get to see them all together, in flocks. They fly with this odd, flapping beat, so the whole flock seems to windmill across the sky. It’s really bizarre, something you never forget.’

‘So how come you know all this stuff?’

Faraday smiled down at her, oddly comforted by the question. Last time they’d met, half a lifetime ago, he couldn’t have told a stilt from a woodpecker. More than that, he’d seen absolutely no point in peering into this strange hierarchy of feather and fowl, so interdependent, so artfully constructed, so utterly different to the me-first anarchy that now passed for society.

‘It was the boy,’ he said simply. ‘We needed to get in touch with each other, build a bridge. I bumped into someone with the same challenge. Birds had worked for her so I gave it a go.’

‘But J-J can’t hear.’ She gestured out at the harbour. From the darkness, again the haunting cry of a curlew.

‘You’re right. But that never seemed to matter. We started with pen and paper and loads of books from the library. He got to drawing up to three eagles an hour. That must have been a world record.’

‘And you took it on from there?’

‘Non-stop, every moment I could. Photos, magazines, videos, I even bought him a stuffed raven one Christmas.’

‘Creepy.’

‘I know. He loved it. He kept it on the bookcase in his bedroom. Used to talk to it in sign. Can you imagine that? An eight-year-old in his jim-jams? Last thing at night? The light off? Head to head with a stuffed raven?’ Faraday laughed at the memory.

‘What about the real thing? You take him places? Go scouting for these critters?’

‘Of course.’

Faraday leaned against the gate, remembering their first birding expeditions, joint adventures to Titchfield Haven and the New Forest, J-J’s bony little hand in his, a thousand pictures come to life. Up in his study, filed carefully away, were the notes and photos from those excursions. Bovver-boy nuthatches in the deep chill of winter. Parachuting meadow pipits in the first blush of spring. Long summer evenings playing games with the butterflying nightjars in a remote stretch of the New Forest they’d practically made their own.

‘Great,’ Patti kept murmuring. ‘You’ve been a great dad.’

‘You think so?’

‘Definitely.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘By watching him. By being with him. By talking to him. He doesn’t talk, I know, but he gets through just the same, maybe better than the rest of us. That says confidence to me. And confidence says great parenting. You should be proud of yourself. How many dads and sons have a relationship like this?’

Faraday ducked his head, suddenly ambushed by a thousand memories. Should he tell her about the tougher times? About the umpteen thoughtless cruelties inflicted by other kids, normal kids? About his six-year-old son abandoned on the beach by yelping playmates too busy to spare him the time? Should he describe those moments in early adolescence, the fourteen-year-old J-J bewildered by the changes in his body, no mum to talk to, no elder brother to compare notes with? And might this not be the moment to share the later dramas – J-J’s dogged flirtation with factory work, the butt of every practical joker with too much time on his hands? And more recently his doomed love affair with a French social worker, a woman with a taste for more than one man in her bed? On each of these occasions J-J had squandered just a little more of his innocence and his passion for life, and if there
was a miracle at all then it lay in the fact that he was still more or less intact, a rock which life’s heavier waves seemed unable to budge.

‘Sweet boy,’ Faraday heard himself saying. ‘But hopeless at washing up.’

Later, with the tall French windows still open, they sat in the lounge while J-J produced sheaf after sheaf of photos. Faraday was starting to wonder whether Patti’s appetite for moody black and white landscapes might start to flag but she never showed a trace of impatience. On the contrary, image after image won her applause, praise that Faraday found all the more heartening because – in Patti’s view – it led straight back to his dead wife.

The way J-J had framed the wreck of an old fishing smack, beached and abandoned on the mudflats across the harbour. The magic he’d conjured from the play of light on one of the freshwater ponds a stone’s throw from the Bargemaster’s House. Work like this, said Patti, was a voice from the past: distinctive, uncompromising, unmistakably Janna. The fact that it had survived in her son’s viewfinder was a small down payment on immortality. The friend she still treasured from those madcap days in the seventies hadn’t, after all, been wiped out by cancer. No, she was here, scattered all over the carpet, still speaking to them.

Faraday, who had little taste for excess, put this little outburst down to their third bottle of Chablis. Talk of immortality made him deeply uncomfortable.

‘No.’ Patti was perched on the edge of the sofa. ‘I mean it. Ansel’s long gone. Yet every time I pick up another of his shots, I can hear his voice. Take a look at some of the stuff from the Rockies, and he’s there in the room with you. No kidding.’

She was on her feet now, scooping up a handful of J-J’s prints. At the foot of the stairs, she picked one out, held it
at arm’s length. Three of Janna’s photographs – Faraday’s favourites – hung on the wall beside the staircase. Faraday narrowed his eyes. She was right. Same framing. Same compulsive need to marry acute observation with a dig in the ribs.

J-J, sprawled on the carpet, was spellbound. If ever he needed confirmation that his work mattered, that the hours in the darkroom had been worthwhile, then here it was.

Patti returned the prints to J-J. Faraday grinned at her.

‘You ought to come over more often, my love.’ He stole a glance at his watch. ‘You do us no end of good.’

MONDAY
, 10
JUNE
, 2002,
06.15

Faraday left early next morning, sinking three cups of tea and scribbling a goodbye note to Patti. Before she retired to bed, she’d presented Faraday with a little gift, a memento from their days together in Seattle. It was yet another photograph, Janna and the young Faraday posed against a distant frieze of snowclad mountains, and she’d mounted the snap in a plain wooden frame that J-J had instantly propped on the shelf where his dad kept his favourite spices. Faraday eyed it now before finishing the note. ‘You’ve made a friend for life,’ he wrote. ‘And not just J-J.’

Out on the road, the traffic was already beginning to thicken ahead of the morning rush hour. Faraday joined the queue of commuter cars grinding up the motorway that sliced through Portsdown Hill, doing his best to ignore a gathering hangover. The weather was still perfect, the gleam of the Solent away to the left, and as the traffic slowed for the busy Gosport exit he wondered when it might be safe to put a call through to Bev Yates. Normally he would have taken Yates with him to Devon – two heads were always better than one – but it was Willard who had suggested going alone. With the Somerstown job still at full throttle,
Merriott
needed Yates back at base.

Faraday had nearly made Dorchester before he reached for the mobile. Eight o’clock in the morning, Bev should be readying himself for the drive to work. Faraday punched in the number, braking for yet another tractor. When the phone was finally answered, it was Melanie on
the line. She sounded harassed. One of the kids was squalling in the background.

‘Bev there?’

‘In body, yes.’

‘Quick word?’

There was a pause. The crying receded. Then the distant roar of a crowd, Bev next door tucked up with the early coverage.

‘All right are we?’

‘Don’t ask. The US of A are beating South Korea. Any more of this and they’ll win the fucking tournament.’

Faraday knew better than to pursue the conversation. Half an hour in a Gibraltar bar had cured him of any interest in football.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘That guy who used to be First Lieutenant in
Accolade
. The one who lives up round your way.’

‘Mark Harrington?’

‘That’s him. Give him a bell first thing. Try and fix to meet.’

‘He’s up at the MoD.’

‘I know. If he’ll see you today, go and talk to him. He’ll know about Coughlin. Press him on the boy, Warren. And another thing …’

‘What’s that, boss?’

‘Ask him for a copy of that bloody report, the Ship’s Investigation. We need to know exactly what happened.’

There was a longish silence, and for a moment Faraday wondered whether Yates, too, might be having second thoughts about the relevance of a long-ago war. Then came the roar from the crowd and Yates was back on the line.

‘Friedal just stopped a penalty.’ He began to laugh. ‘Can you believe that?’

Winter spotted the car at once. He was standing in the front room, still in his dressing gown, debating whether
or not to tackle the morning post. A council tax demand and a couple of other bills could certainly wait but a holiday brochure for packages in the Greek Islands looked promising. Given the events of the past few days, there might be worse things than a year or two tucked up in some villa on Santorini.